Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Comments on French Homework Ban

NJ.com has an editorial entitled "French Proposal to Ban Homework is Dunce Move." I provided the following comment on their website:Calling this a “dunce”
proposal is a fairly simplistic response to a highly complicated issue. Here
are my thoughts:

1.The notion that homework is persecutory to
the poor has been well-documented even before President Hollande took his
stand. Etta Kralovec and John Buell made a compelling argument about this in
their book, “The End of Homework.” The fact that many individuals at the lower
rung of our social hierarchy believe in homework is not surprising. We respect
different points of view. But scholarly studies give support to what President
Hollande says.

2.Turnaround schools in impoverished areas
are almost always characterized by a reduced dependence on homework. I’ve
followed numerous accounts of inner city school success stories and, to a tee,
they bank on what goes on in the school, not what the children have to do when
they go home.

3.You don’t have to be poor to like
President Hollande’s approach. Many conservative and affluent families have
opted for homeschooling, not just on religious grounds, but to protect the
sanctity of their homes. The reality is that homework traverses the boundaries
between home and school, vesting huge authority in 30 to 40 different people,
teachers, over the course of a child’s life, over the authority of the parent.
I don’t doubt these teachers are thoughtful and sincere, but it is still an
example of overreach and an assault to parental decision-making and authority.
This issue often goes unnoticed because homework is not a problem if, in the
particular case, it is not a problem. But when it is, parents find themselves
in an unusually helpless position as heads of their homes. Conservatives, who
resent government intrusion into the family, should think about how that
relates to the no homework policy.

4.Teachers are not trained to give
homework. A cursory view of a typical catalog for any school of education will
highlight that there are no courses called homework. A review of the workshops
in a standard teacher professional conference will show an absence of meetings
on homework. The public does not realize this, but teachers are giving homework
and weighting it heavily, even though their own teacher training spends little
time studying the issue.

5.France had a ban on homework in the
elementary schools before President Hollande made his pronouncement. Last
spring, there was a teacher-parent organized strike in France because teachers
were overriding and not adhering to what was already official policy at the
lower grades. This has not made the news.

My major and
only criticism of President Hollande’s decision lies in the fact that it is a
top-down decision and runs the same risk that many of our own top-down
decisions about improving education have had. The issue of educational
philosophy should be coming at the teacher level, just as the issue of teacher
evaluations should occur at that level. In that sense, both France and the
United States have it wrong trying to effect change through political mandates rather
than through professional forces. The Finns are the ones who really have it
right. They invest much more time and energy into teacher training. Their
teachers are more respected than ours tend to be. Their system of education
receives accolades around the world. And, interestingly, Finns assign very
little homework.